A law blog addressing the foci of 3 intrepid law geeks, specializing in their respective fields of knowledge management, internet marketing and library sciences, melding together to form the Dynamic Trio.

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2/9/10

The Financial Times reported at the end of January that "Evan Williams, the chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, which has been credited with helping anti-government protesters in Iran to organise resistance, said software developers were working on 'interesting hacks' to stop any blocking by foreign governments."
Is it just me or did this bother anyone else?
To me, there just seems to be something intrinsically wrong with a company essentially declaring war against a country. Basically, Evan is saying he and all of Twitterdom were going to flame China.
Let me say this again: Twitter is going to flame China.
Think about that. Why is that any different from someone from some former Eastern Bloc country sending a trojan horse into all of the banking firms in the United States and essentially crippling our economy?
We would not tolerate it. Commerce would be screaming with outrage. The Hill would be holding forth on the dastardly deeds of these horrible hackers.
So why didn't any one step over to Mr. Williams' office and tell him to tone it down? Maybe they did. We will never know.
But this is exactly the point that I keep making over and over again: the web is a brave, new world. In this virtual world, there are no sheriffs, no boundaries, no laws. And the people that rule are the ones that can break and make the secret code the acts as the DNA that creates the protoplasm that is the base of all the organisms in this new world.
So watch these tech companies. Don't be so naive to think that their ambitions are singular. Just like Tears for Fears said not so long ago, "everybody wants to rule the world."